Episode 105 – Making Industrial IoT Work: Lessons from 30 Years in Automation with Grace Technologies

Industrial IoT Monitoring Solutions: In this episode of Over the Air, host Bill Brock engages in a deep conversation with Drew Allen, CEO of Grace Technologies, exploring how real-world manufacturing experience shapes successful industrial IoT solutions. This wide-ranging discussion reveals the intricate balance between innovation and practicality in industrial automation, while challenging common Silicon Valley assumptions about manufacturing technology.

Grace Technologies has a 30+ year legacy in industrial automation. They have evolved from creating simple interface solutions to developing sophisticated IoT systems. Drew breaks down their four major product lines:
-The original Graceport programmable interface connectors.
-Electrical safety devices for lockout/tagout procedures.
-Advanced wireless vibration monitoring solutions.
-Their groundbreaking perpetual power puck technology.

Each product line represents a careful response to actual plant floor needs rather than theoretical solutions.

Drew offers a refreshingly candid perspective on the state of industrial IoT adoption. He noted that technology diffusion across industrial verticals remains “agonizingly slow.”

For manufacturers, system integrators, technology developers, and anyone interested in the real-world application of IoT in industrial settings, this episode provides crucial insights into both the technical and practical aspects of industrial digital transformation. Drew’s combination of technical expertise offers a masterclass in how to successfully bridge the gap between traditional manufacturing and Industry 4.0 technologies.

About the Show

“Over the Air” features unfiltered conversations with executives about their IoT journeys. The mistakes they made, the lessons they learned, and what they wished they’d known when they started. In each episode, our expert guests make bold predictions, reveal unpopular opinions, and share stories you won’t hear anywhere else.

Buyers Guide – How to Choose the Right IoT Company: Very

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Transcript:

Today, we’ve got a great show. My name is Bill Brock, the CEO of Peridio, and we also have Drew Allen, CEO of Grace Technologies. Welcome to the show, Drew. 

Hey, thanks for having me on, Bill. I’m excited to have this conversation today. Yeah, me too. 

So, for those who aren’t familiar with Grace, can you give us a little bit of an overview on what you guys do? Sure. Grace Technologies, we’ve been in automation space since 91. We have been a Brockville and Compass partner for about 25-plus years. 

We have four different product lines that we design, manufacture, and distribute here in Devonport, Iowa. One is a line of, our first product was called Graceport. It’s a line of programmable interface connectors for control cabinets. 

The second is our line of permanent electrical safety devices to make mechanical electrical lockout takeout safer and more productive. The third is a wireless vibration monitoring solution, as well as other transducers, kind of in the IIoT space. And the fourth is our perpetual power puck, which is able to use a thermal differential to generate power, to power all these wireless sensors throughout factories. 

It’s keyed in specifically for Emerson process transmitters right now, but we’ll be expanding that line to other wireless transducers shortly. That is really cool. And four product lines, that’s quite a lot. 

Very focused on the IIoT space. What was that initial beachhead for you guys? You’ve been around for a while. So the initial beachhead was really, our CTO founded a company called Civionics. 

And Civionics was really focused more on the structural monitoring space. And we ended up taking some of the things that he had learned and some statistical analysis methods. And we applied them at Chrysler in their stamping facilities. 

And we were monitoring mainly current in that facility. And we were able to really save them a huge amount of downtime by just monitoring current on different stamping processes and robotic applications. We then kind of were starting to listen to the market and they were like, hey, we also want to monitor vibration. 

And monitoring vibration is a bit more complex than just monitoring increase or decrease in current, unless you’re doing kind of motor current signature analysis. And so we developed out a full product line. We actually have a new product coming out in that space in the next few weeks. 

And we’re really excited about kind of to see where that product goes and see how people really start to implement it more. There’s still a lot of low hanging fruit there in the industry regarding IIoT and wireless vibration monitoring. Where we’ve kind of keyed in our solution is the control integration. 

We have a ton of customer feedback regarding, you know, hey, I don’t want to be locked in to kind of annual recurring revenue contract. And so we give people optionality to be able to drive a predictive maintenance IIoT system through their local PLC network. And that’s really kind of what we’ve been focused on from a technology development perspective.

So what makes vibration so much harder than current? In current, typically you’re not doing a 4A transform. And the amount of, you know, what you can really tell on current, unless you’re in super high resolution, is basically whether or not that current is at the same level elevated or not. And, you know, so usually when the current is elevated, you know, it’s indicative of a problem, but you can’t really figure out what problem it is without really pretty high-end transducers.

Vibration, though, depending on kind of the rule sets, you’re able to run it through a classification system and really understand it’s kind of like those old stereos where, you know, you have your base and your treble and you’re kind of like watching, you know, the levels come up and down. And that’s basically representative of 4A transform. And depending on where things are in those bands are indicative of whether they’re sub-secretness, secretness, or kind of a multiple of the shaft speed. 

And, you know, as you combine those kind of different rule sets, you’re able to really dial in and understand hate. This is the kind of defect that is starting to indicate. So I think in my mind, I was thinking about more the systems integration piece and that it might be easier just to attach something to another thing that’s detecting vibration.

But you’re saying that the math behind the scenes and the actual, like what you do with the analysis is like serious level up from. Yeah, it’s definitely a level of complexity more than on the current monitoring. But you’re right, being able to walk up and just slap something magnetic onto a rotating asset is really simple, but the behind the scenes is more complex. 

I mean, isn’t that like everything in life? It’s like the simple thing turns out to be the hardest thing to do. Yeah, yeah. It’s like really quick to get 80% of the way there and then a hard stop. 

Yeah. And so you mentioned that you guys are doing some like tier one integration with the PLCs or with the actual vendors. Like what does that look like and getting a gray sensor integrated with an existing industrial ecosystem? Yeah. 

So as the fact that we’ve been a rock wall encompass, well, now it’s like technology partner, but we’ve been a rock wall technology partner for so long. One of the options that they have available to us is their add on profile. And so you kind of combine this add on profile with an EDS file. 

And we talk Ethernet IP direct into the PLC that basically you’re able to just pull in and set up all the tags and everything comes in pre-populated. We were doing our first integration project after the AOP launched and the integrator who was responsible for it, he booked out like, I don’t know, it was four or six days of time or something. He got it done in four hours. 

And so the ability to kind of do that over Ethernet IP and have that native integration is really powerful because integration is, at the end of the day, there’s going to be a lot of vibration offerings. It’s all about how specialized it is to your application and how it’s going to integrate into your systems and facility. And look, I’ll be honest, sometimes our integration methods aren’t going to be as good as someone else’s integration method for your facility.

And that’s a really important deciding factor when you’re looking at kind of a vibration monitoring partner. That being said, obviously we do have a cloud offering and we have an open API that you’re able to go ahead and pull from. But there is something to doing some native integrations, that’s some secret sauce and really helpful to those plant fuller guys.

I think another benefit of that control system integration is it’s presenting directly to the operator. And typically in a cloud-based approach, you’re having to go into a browser or an alert or an app on your phone, whereas these operators are kind of trained to not be on their phones. And so you have an HMI screen there operating a pump or something else, and this is able to go ahead and alarm right there presently, especially if the piece of equipment is kind of air gapped for safety or security concerns.

That’s really interesting. So listeners out there who are developing systems for similar products to yours, maybe they want to send something or provide value to a manufacturer, you recommend going first with the integration and getting in close to somebody like Rockwell, or would you go cloud first? How do you guys think about that? I would say that you want to deploy cloud first because it’s the quickest and you can start to generate some ROI and get some easy wins. And then basically then the team is going to be bought into your approach, but you have to always have at least a mind of like, how are you going to integrate that thing in the future? I actually, I did a webinar last week, an internal webinar, and it was a slightly different product, but we have a product that actually monitors switch gear. 

And a very large food manufacturer went ahead and budgeted for a bunch of these units to be put in on their transformers and their switch gear. And I checked in with them kind of a year after the install, I go, hey, how’s it going? How’s the data look? And they go, oh, we actually, we had an arc flash and the gear blew up. And I was like, I was like, oh no. 

I was like, did we miss it? And, and he goes, oh, no, no, no, you guys caught it a hundred percent. He goes, our local, the local plant manager didn’t have the budget to go ahead and integrate the system. And so they just, you know, their integration was having someone go out and basically grab the data log, the CSV file, you know, and download it like every few months. 

And so they were able to like grab our unit out of like the wreckage of the, you know, out of the transformer that blew and pop it up open. And sure enough, you know, the temperature was dramatically increasing. And if anyone would have been setting an alarm point, they would have, you know, avoided basically, I think it turned out to be something like $800,000 event.

Plus it’s, I mean, that’s, that’s a significant safe, like safety concern. I mean, we’re, we’re talking about productivity, but really safety and productivity are the same sides, you know, are different sides of the same coin. And so integration is really important, having a strategy for it, but testing and getting something working and providing value quickly in an industrial facility is, is really the, the first name of the game.

And then, you know, having an eye towards the integration as you, as you pick your, your partner. Well, I like, I like what you shared and also the, the focus on the user. I don’t hear that as much in the industrial space and you go and you look at these products and these websites and it’s all like low code, quick integration, whatever. 

But actually understanding how to get that value to the end user quickly and understanding their trained workflows and systems that they’re working within, that is further and further between solutions. And so how do you guys as a company ensure that you’re constantly building for the, the actual operators? Do you have like get early feedback or what does that look like? You know, like we’re a lot of, a lot of companies say that their customer obsessed. You know, I really believe that we are, I mean, we, we really, really try to start every product design piece. 

We really start with the customer and work backwards. So we do aggressive voice of customer kind of constantly listening. You know, as we’re on, as we’re on calls with customers, we log everything in our, in our databases.

So we’re able to go ahead and pull up transcripts and we can run them through LLMs and be able to get kind of a sentiment analysis. We have a huge amount of kind of like conversations that are constantly going on with customers. The other thing is, is like, I like to say, okay, I’m at the machine. 

What am I doing? Like, like we design this product, what problem are we solving? You know, walk me through what my procedure looked like before and what it should look like now. I’d also say, I mean, we have, we have folks who have been in industry for a long time. And, and look, I don’t want to, I don’t want to speak ill of anyone in the space or whatever, but this, there’s a, there’s a general idea that Silicon Valley can do industrial. 

And I’m not sure it’s, it’s panned out in the right way. And I know that, you know, a paper machine, you know, the complex lockout takeout procedures in a paper machine, it’s very, very different than a simple packaging machine. But I’m not sure that the folks sitting in San Jose, kind of trying to do the startup life really understand the complexities of an industrial environment. 

They don’t understand, hey, you’re, you know, you’re walking around underneath a stamping press. And it’s just, it’s just, you know, dripping oil everywhere. And you have to go and like change this bolt. 

Well, if we can just change the location of the bolt change, you know, all of a sudden, I’m not wet with grease. And these are some real practical applications. I think when you start walking around, you just you do plant floor visits, you talk with the actual operators, you’re selling to electricians. 

You know, you’re not just kind of talking to engineers and corporate, it’s a really different level of engagement and insight of how to make these workers lives more productive, safer, easier as well. So this example you just gave on the internal webinar, you mentioned that they, they were pulling data directly from the machine. I’m sure this was a sub optimal integration for you guys early on. 

What, how do you start to think about, you know, situations where folks might not have the tech or the resources to get that real time visibility or to get that access? You know, we’re going to do our best to be their trusted advisor. Sometimes though, customer levels, there’s a level of sophistication that a customer needs to have in order to be competent within a, you know, kind of a modern IOT system. For instance, in our, in our product line, that’s more safety related. 

One of the first questions we ask people is, do you have an NFPA-70E program? So NFPA-70E is the National Fire Protection Association’s code for behavior around electrical equipment. And so basically, if they say, no, we don’t have, you know, we don’t follow NFPA-70E, well, they’re just not going to be a good customer. Like they, they haven’t started their electrical safety journey. 

They don’t have any expertise. All of a sudden I’m talking about something that they really don’t have any insight on. And, and, you know, they’re just early on in their journey. 

But I think that this IIoT journey is very similar. It’s like, have you went through and costed your downtime? How much does downtime cost you in this facility? Right? If it like, if we have it, if you don’t have some basic answers kind of to these questions, pouring on a bunch of technology that they may or may not be equipped to handle is not, you know, it’s probably not going to like work well. And then if they, if they don’t have a level of kind of technical expertise to be able to support the technology and house, you know, then that’s going to, we’re going to have to really be super involved and, and, you know, we can do that, but it’s probably not ideal because we want them to own their own system at the end of the day. 

Did that answer your question? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, more or less that there’s wide variations of, of skill and more interest in the technology. 

And you have to truly understand what you’re buying in order to appreciate it and leverage it. Yeah. The, what do you see as far as the market opportunity? I mean, you guys are very, you’ve been doing well in the space. 

You’ve been in business for a long time. Industry 4.0 is always right around the corner. I guess it’s here in many regards, but maybe at more sophisticated factories than other, like what do you, what are you saying as far as general market adoption of solutions like yours? Yeah. 

I think we’re still in the early days. Diffusion, diffusion across industrial verticals is, is probably agonizingly slow. Explain that diffusion, what you mean by that. 

So, so within a, within, even within the same vertical, so a piece of technology that all of a sudden gets its start in automotive, you know, might take 20 years before all of a sudden it shows up in a saw mill. And, you know, that, that kind of that early adopter curve where like, you know, it just, it just seems in industrial to really take a long time to be able to prove that out. You know, even if you’ve got a stellar product, you’re still looking at sometimes a 9 to 18 month kind of adoption cycle and sales cycle on an offering in industrial space. 

There’s a lot of other spaces I think can move a lot quicker than, than industrials, but at the end of the day, they want to go ahead and test something out. And I think there’s also a lot of failures kind of projects that have started that they haven’t gone so well. And so we’re running at customers all the time where, you know, there’s a ton of opportunity for all of our product lines, especially on the IIoT front. 

You know, I would say that most of the large companies, you know, the, the, you know, $10 billion plus revenue companies, you know, they’ve got a lot of offerings that they’ve already tried in the space, but even, you know, individual facilities may have not adopted something that corporate wanted them to adopt. And so I think that opportunity is, is still large. And, you know, it’s still something that we’re very excited about.

I think, I think, I think that, I think like the current, like the numbers that you hear on wireless condition monitoring is like, it’s like a $20 billion market or something. I don’t know who comes up with these numbers. I mean, I just, just, it’s just like everyone’s like going through their marketing thing. 

Let me just find the biggest number and then I’m of course. Yeah. And that’s how you get money. 

You just make numbers up. Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, an industrial IOT is growing. Like you do look at the, the predictions, whatever, and the industrial systems, industrial sensors are just going to grow so much over the next 10 years. And it does seem that the ability to manage these systems well is just incredibly difficult and varies greatly by company, by company. 

What are, what are your customers as far as you mentioned the like local integration, working with Rockwell versus cloud. What, what, like, what’s the split as far as your customers, they’re like, Hey, we want to manage this, integrate it with an existing system versus we want to look at the else cloud offering. Yeah. 

So we’re, we’re probably about 40% control only. Okay. Probably about another 40% where that it’s control and cloud. 

So best of both worlds and then 20% cloud only. Cool. How hard is that to get the I T and onboard with a cloud offering for a factory? Um, depends on if they’re going through it in a fully approved manner, right? Yeah. 

I mean, we do offer an LTE, you know, option, which a lot of times, you know, if they don’t want to get it involved, they’re able to kind of go via the, via the LTE outlet. You know, for us, it’s varied widely on Wi-Fi coverage and how quality the IT personnel are kind of in that facility. The better ones, they’re going to typically have some sort of like form or guidelines that you need to kind of like work through. 

And then you like, okay, Hey, we do this that, you know, and you kind of work through the form and it goes pretty well. Um, but, uh, if, if it’s, if it’s like the first time that that the engineer that you’re working with has gone and integrated a, um, a wireless device in the facility, it can go a little rough if they don’t maybe, Oh, I don’t know. Who do I have need to work with an IT? Well, that’s usually a bad, uh, a bad indicator of things to come. 

What’s, what, what’s been, what’s, I mean, what else have you guys heard so far as the IT factory floor OT thing? Oh, cellular is, is like, we’re just going to go another route. It seems to be the safest or quickest route for deployment. And, uh, we’ve, we’ve developed a few of these in a prior life, uh, very, and it seemed that, uh, cellular was always a requirement. 

That was the easiest thing to get in place, but you might not always have good access. What have you guys found about, um, the, you know, so, so cellular, a lot of people in the IoT space, um, you know, you think LTE is all one flavor, right? And so there’s, there’s, but there’s really the LTE cat M and then there’s like cat IOT or IOT or MBIOT, there we go. You know, we’ve, we’ve always found it difficult to be able to project what LTE coverage that area is actually going to have even an industrial facility. 

They’ll say, Oh, well I have an LTE, um, repeater or whatever in my facility, but it’s not repeating those bands. And so like sometimes, you know, we, we, there’s even complexities, I think on sometimes deploying out LTE at a facility. I would just say, if, if you’re listening and you’re going to go through a IOT or any sort of wireless thing, get the stuff in and just try it out ahead of time.

I mean, it’s like really, it’s, there’s no, there’s no magic prediction. Like you just need to like plug it in and like turn it on and like, do I have it? Yeah. Development is always tested in the optimistic scenarios. 

Um, and yeah, turns out that when you deploy into our school or a hospital, maybe there’s like cement on the roof and it’s just a different, different scenario entirely. Yeah. Or, or then like on the back in the wifi conversation, it’s like, Oh, well we’re going to deprecate this network. 

Yeah. And you’re like, uh, okay, well you got to move them over. And then you’re trying to get people to move their stuff over.

It’s like, then they just turn it off over Christmas break. And then everyone’s like, well, all my stuff didn’t work. Is it working? And then the battery starts dying. 

It’s like, you know, it’s like, you know, gotta be a little bit more cognizant of what’s going on on, uh, on the systems. What are y’all doing for your wireless? Are you doing just regular wifi? Are you trying any like Laura solutions, anything like that? We haven’t played around much with Laura. Um, uh, I think Andy did a little bit in some of his PhD work or CTO. 

Uh, we have Zigbee from our nodes to our gateways, uh, an 802 dot 15 dot four kind of connection. And we stripped out some of the overhead because we didn’t need it. And then we, we go then either LT wifi ethernet IP or mod bus, uh, TCP IP or RTU then into either the cloud or, um, the cloud or the local control system. 

We do have the ability to deploy the cloud on prem, you know, or we can deploy that cloud in a private cloud for the, in the facility as well. Yeah. Yeah. 

Yeah. Cool. Yeah. 

Super interesting. Yeah. I just, um, get so fascinated hearing about these industrial deployments because you’ve got the machinery, you know, everybody’s operating kind of in some like pseudo Faraday cage environment connectivity can be really hard. 

And, uh, the general like it operate like it OT, like just logistical challenges of getting in these networks are, are not trivial. And so it’s cool to hear you guys be so successful in getting in and getting integrated with these existing systems. Well, you know, you, you, you learn from your lumps. 

Yeah. Right. So, so, you know, we’ve taken our lumps, you know, and I think that’s important though, is, is okay. 

Hey, you, you, you know, you don’t get, you don’t get born industrially hardened. Yeah. You, you develop those calluses over time and, and unfortunately they’re painful to go through, but eventually, you know, you start learning like little lessons, you know, like for instance, we had a node that like lost connectivity, you know, and so I’m like, uh, you know, so we send one of our engineers out there to like inspect it and like, sure, like sure enough, they put a massive machine with, you know, six inch stick feel steel, like, you know, like between the gateway and like the nodes and it’s like, there’s no wireless signal.

That’s all of a sudden going to like get through, you know, inches and inches of steel. So, you know, like, so now we just ask, did any machinery move if you’re experiencing, uh, if you’re experiencing an outage between your node and your, your, uh, gateway? Oh yeah, we moved, you know, and okay. All right, by the way. 

Yeah. Maybe you need to redeploy where the gateway is. We had a episode a few months back, actually, it might not be a few months back, depending on airtime, but, uh, it was with an EV charging company, uh, power flex, I believe was the name. 

And, um, they do more than EV charging. I’m sure I’ll get, get my hands slapped for trivializing it. But one of the key takeaways was that the EV charging performance, it comes down to connectivity and what a hard challenge that is because these chargers are almost all going cellular and they’re installing them in parking garages and you’ve got trucks and trailers, like going in between like metal boxes, just moving in between these things all the time. 

And like, man, I did not even think about that before. I just assumed that everything would be hardwired and local and easy, but they all go wireless. And, uh, yeah, you have a pretty, pretty wild environment out in the field.

Do so I might sound like a, uh, I was a ludite. Um, but, uh, I, I do feel like the, the promises that were made regarding 5g, um, I very rarely do. I think that technology has maybe left, let us down more than like 5g, uh, the transformation that 5g was going to bring.

I mean, a lot of times I just switch off the 5g and go to the LTE and it’s a lot more of a reliable connection. I have a 5g repeater on my telephone pole in front of my house and I live in a, I get no cell phone. I can literally see the repeater from the porch and it doesn’t work.

It’s very frustrating. Yeah. So I, I mean, look, I, it’s not a solved problem. 

No, I mean, this, this wireless stuff, you know, I think people who have spent a lot of time doing wireless deployments, they’re going to tell you no matter what, it’s still an art. It’s less a science and, um, it’s trial and error and you wish that you could just wave a magic wand and, and do it, but, um, it’s, it’s just, it’s just not that easy. But look, I think when you look at the economics of wireless comparable to a wired system, it’s, it’s at least an order of magnitude less expensive to go wireless offering than to go a wired offering. 

So yeah. And the, the security getting into a facility and having to get into that network is it’s hard collaborating with the local administrators and their maturities. So yeah, having the, having cellular as an option is a big deal. 

So you guys, uh, you’ve been around for decades. You haven’t always been in this space, right? Or what, like, what was the early, early stages of the company like? Yeah. So my dad started the business in 91. 

He, uh, his history, he kind of, he came from at the time Allen Bradley and then Rockwell. Um, he grew up in Pasadena, California, kind of down the street from JPL. Um, and then went to Cal Poly, uh, moved out to Milwaukee, met my mom there. 

They got job transferred out to Northern Maine. And at the time, you know, there was this like newfangled technology called variable frequency drives and all the cool kids in Northern Maine were using variable frequency drives. And so Rockwell, um, he got to be kind of an expert of those. 

They kind of tapped him to come and work at work with the largest, uh, VFD account in North America at the time, which was Conay elevator. Well, it was Montgomery elevator, but South Conay elevator. Um, and, uh, you know, he was enjoying his career and then he, he, he didn’t get such a great boss and decided I’m done doing the corporate thing. 

I’m going to start up my own, uh, business. And so he started up a system migration business. Okay. 

And, you know, he’s working on a, on a, uh, friction fit welder retrofit for John Deere. And, you know, the engineer was kind of tired of like reaching his hand around the bus bar in order to like plug into the PLC. And so he calls up my dad, Hey, can you guys make me like some sort of like, you know, port on the outside of the panel? So I don’t have to like reach around this like bus bar, you know, and dad’s like, you know, my dad’s just like an inventor and just like always says yes. 

He’s one of these yes guys, you know, yeah, yeah, yeah. We’ll figure it out. Yeah. 

And so like a week later, they develop a prototype, you know, send it over to the customer, customer installs it, you know, like another week later, he calls up, he goes, Hey, can I get another one of those gray sports? And so like, that was like, you know, that was like the genesis of the gray sport. And then we became like super interested in this idea of like, you’re still rolling with that 30 years later, you got the great website. That’s really cool. 

It’s like the, you know, Kleenex tissue situation in our space. And you know, we do we have, we were really early on the whole mass customization model. So we have like, you know, 16,000 skews in our system. 

And every week we had like another five. And even if we’ve never built it before, we’re able to build and ship in two to three days. So we had this like, we have lasers cutting stuff out. 

And you know, it’s, it’s just, it’s quite a cool little like product that we that we innovated. And, and so he kind of continued to grow that but we came obsessed with just like this idea of like keeping workers away from voltage. And we picked up on something, we picked up on some, some key trends, as we got involved more on in electrical safety space. 

And that was mainly that there’s a causation and correlation effect between like safety and productivity. So we found that if you were able to be safer and more productive at the same time, this became this like self enforcing feedback loop. And really, that’s where people wanted to invest resources. 

Because if it was like just safety, but it killed the productivity, then operations didn’t want to fund it. If it was just productivity, but people are getting hurt, then you know, that’s not a good situation either, obviously. And you know, but if we could accomplish kind of the power of the and safety and productivity, instead of safety or productivity, we found that that was really a winner for us. 

And then we started looking at that intersection of both productivity, safety and reliability. There was a, there’s a gentleman who has spoken and I’m blanking on his name, because the cameras are on me, obviously. There was something there was a study done in something like 70% of all injuries in the workplace happened during reactive maintenance. 

So it’s this idea of, it’s this idea of like the machine is broken, and operations is calling me and going, you got to get this thing up and running, you know, right now, that that’s when shortcuts happen. And when we, you know, and we haven’t planned out our work well, and, you know, and all of a sudden, we’re hurried, and we make mistakes. And so it was like, hey, well, I think there’s an opportunity to, you know, improve reliability in a factory, improve productivity in a factory and improve safety kind of all at the same time. 

You know, and then we have such a kind of a global distribution base and access to so many fantastic, innovative customers, we just felt like we had a we had an opportunity to be able to explore this IIo T piece. And, you know, I think it’s turned out to have been a good bet. Awesome. 

Well, I’ll ease up on the interrogation. This is just super, super interesting space. You’re three years into the CEO role. 

So three going on for what like, you do everything, you’re also very technical, but just in the role you take on the ownership of the whole business, of course, but where like, where are your strengths? What do you get most excited about? Do you like that the marketing side, you like the technical, you like that the customer, like where, where are you most comfortable? Or where do you like to engage? Yeah, so I really, I really like the, I really love the customer interaction, because it fuels everything in a business. And, you know, this idea of like starting with the customer and working backwards. If I’m not engaged in customer activity, I start to feel kind of like dead on the vine. 

You know, like all of, you know, so I try to put certain customer events and other things in my schedule purposefully, especially when I’m trying to start to think about new products, and do product development, because all of the best ideas come from them. Right. And so if I’m able to take their idea, and I’m able to kind of productize it, that’s really, that’s really kind of what I that excites me, I really believe that. 

So my wife is a ballerina, and she does, she choreographs, like, you know, off Broadway shows and stuff. And she’s like incredibly talented, and it is not my world at all. But she thinks in dance. 

So when when she like when when she’s like going around thinking about her day, you know, and she hears a song, or there’s some interaction, she sees everything as a dance. I think if you’re an author, you see everything as a book. And I think, you know, if you’re a musician, you see everything is like music. 

And we have these like skill sets that we just like default of like how we see the world. And I really feel like I’m kind of like I see everything in product. I also I have like, I have a lot of friends like in the real estate sector. 

And so, you know, they see everything through the lens of real estate, they’re like, Oh, that could be like, I can put two hotels there and 18 talent houses and do you know, and they they’re doing all the math in their head, you know, and like some people are software people, but I just kind of see that world and product. And I have a pretty good idea of then how to like commercialize and get it out and what you know, what makes it exciting. We really don’t. 

It’s really not interesting to me to do need to commodity stuff, we really like developing things that we think we have a unique edge on. You know, because that’s where the fun is, you know, I yeah, what are you excited about? What’s next? Like, what are the areas that you’re looking at? I, I’ve started to realize that there’s a intersection between monitoring of the equipment, equipment to do that, as well as then potentially monitoring the humans who are interacting with the equipment. And so I think you’ll be seeing something from us maybe in the wearable space at some point in the future.

And trying to think through maybe how that interacts with some of our some of our electrical safety stuff, potentially some of our IOT offerings, and also how we bring IOT into the rest of all of our other offerings as kind of a core technology. You know, there’s there’s a there’s another book, it’s like when ideas have sex. And that’s like where all the creativity comes from, you know, and it’s like, so how do we find that? Yeah, you know, yeah, I didn’t make it up, you know, but there’s, it’s like, you know, how we can kind of like, create these areas of technology advancement within, you know, by having combining ideas and concepts and technology that we’ve already worked so hard on building. 

All right, Drew. Well, thanks for coming on. Awesome show. 

And yeah, follow Drew on LinkedIn, reach out, see him on the road. And yeah, check out these products. There’s a lot of really interesting stuff on there. 

Hey, thanks so much for the time, Bill. Thanks for, you know, using your platform to help people kind of advance their factories. And, you know, I think manufacturing is here, but it’s also the future. 

So it’s an important thing. We’re just trying to further the edge. And yeah, folks like you are really doing a great job. 

So thanks a lot. And we’ll close it out. Have a good day.

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